Hillerman, Tony - [Leaphorn & Chee 13] (3 page)

"I didn't," Jano said. "I didn't hit him. I just walked up
and he was here." He nodded toward Kinsman. "Just lying there like
that."

"Like hell," Chee said. "How'd you get that blood all over
you then, and your arm cut up like—"

A rasping shriek and a clatter behind him cut off the question. Chee spun,
pistol pointing. A squawking sound came from behind the outcrop where Kinsman
lay. Behind it a metal birdcage lay on its side. It was a large cage, but
barely large enough to hold the eagle struggling inside it. Chee lifted it by
the ring at its top, rested it on the sandstone slab and stared at Jano. "A
federal offense," he said. "Poaching an endangered species. Not as
bad as felony assault on a law officer, but—"

"Watch out!" Jano shouted.

Too late. Chee felt the eagle's talons tearing at the side of his hand.

"That's what happened to me," Jano said. "That's how I got so
bloody."

Icy raindrops hit Chee's ear, his cheek, his shoulder, his bleeding hand.
The shower engulfed them, and with it a mixture of hailstones. He covered
Kinsman with his jacket and moved the eagle's cage under the shelter of the
outcrop. He had to get help for Kinsman fast, and he had to keep the eagle
under shelter. If Jano was telling the truth, which seemed extremely unlikely,
there would be blood on the bird. He didn't want Jano's defense attorney to be
able to claim that Chee had let the evidence wash away.

THE LIMO THAT HAD PARKED in front of Joe Leaphom's house was a glossy
blue-black job with the morning sun glittering on its polished chrome. Leaphorn
had stood behind his screen door watching it—hoping his neighbors on this
fringe of Window Rock wouldn't notice it. Which "was like hoping the kids
who played in the schoolyard down his gravel street wouldn't notice a herd of
giraffes trotting by. The limo's arrival so early meant the man sitting
patiently behind the wheel must have left Santa Fe about 3:00 A.M. That made
Leaphorn ponder what life would be like as a hireling of the very rich—which
Well, in just a few minutes he'd have a chance to find out. The limo now was
turning off a narrow asphalt road in Santa Fe's northeast foothills onto a
brick driveway. It stopped at an elaborate iron gate.

"Is this it?" Leaphorn asked.

"Yep," the driver said, which was about the average length of the
answers Leaphorn had been getting before he'd stopped asking questions. He'd
started with the standard break-the-ice: gasoline mileage on the limo, how it
handled, that sort of thing. Went from that into how long the driver had worked
for Millicent Vanders, which proved to be twenty-one years. Beyond that point,
Leaphorn's digging ran into granite.

"Who is Mrs. Vanders?" Leaphorn had asked.

"My boss."

Leaphorn had laughed. "That's not what I meant."

"I didn't think it was."

"You know anything about this job she's going to offer me?"

"No."

"What she wants?"

"It's none of my business."

So Leaphorn dropped it. He watched the scenery, learned that even the rich
could find only country-western music on their radios here, tuned in KNDN to
listen in on the Navajo open-mike program. Someone had lost his billfold at the
Farmington bus station and was asking the finder to return his driver's license
and credit card. A woman was inviting members of the Bitter Water and Standing
Rock clans, and all other kinfolk and friends, to show up for a
yeibichai
sing to be held for Emerson Roanhorse at his place north of Kayenta. Then came
an old-sounding voice declaring that Billy Etcitty's roan mare was missing from
his place north of Burnt Water and asking folks to let him know if they spotted
it. "Like maybe at a livestock auction," the voice added, which suggested
that Etcitty presumed his mare hadn't wandered off without assistance. Soon
Leaphorn had surrendered to the soft luxury of the limo seat and dozed. When he
awoke, they were rolling down 1-25 past Santa Fe's outskirts.

Leaphorn then had fished Millicent Vanders's letter from his jacket pocket
and reread it.

It wasn't, of course, directly from Millicent Vanders. The letterhead read
Peabody, Snell and Glick, followed by those initials law firms use. The address
was Boston. Delivery was FedEx's Priority Overnight.

Dear Mr. Leaphorn:

This is to confirm and formalize our telephone confirmation of this date. I
write you in the interest of Mrs. Millicent Vanders, who is represented by this
firm in some of her affairs. Mrs. Vanders has charged me with finding an
investigator familiar with the Navajo Reservation whose reputation for
integrity and circumspection is impeccable.

You have been recommended to us as satisfying these requirements. This
inquiry is to determine if you would be willing to meet with Mrs. Vanders at
her summer home in Santa Fe and explore her needs with her. If so, please call
me so arrangements can be made for her car to pick you up and for your
financial reimbursement. I must add that Mrs. Vanders expressed a sense of
urgency in this affair.

Leaphorn's first inclination had been to write Christopher Peabody a polite
"thanks but no thanks" and recommend he find his client a licensed
private investigator instead of a former cop.

But…

There was the fact that Peabody, surely the senior partner, had signed the
letter himself, and the business of having his circumspection rated impeccable,
and—most important of all—the "sense of urgency" note, which made the
woman's problem sound interesting. Leaphorn needed something interesting. He'd
soon be finishing his first year of retirement from the Navajo Tribal Police.
He'd long since run out of things to do. He was bored.

And so he'd called Mr. Peabody back and here he was, driver pushing the
proper button, gate sliding silently open, rolling past lush landscaping toward
a sprawling two-story house—its tan plaster and brick copings declaring it to
be what Santa Feans call "Territorial Style" and its size declaring
it a mansion.

The driver opened the door for Leaphorn. A young man wearing a faded blue shirt
and jeans, his blond hair tied in a pigtail, stood smiling just inside the
towering double doors.

"Mr. Leaphorn," he said. "Mrs. Vanders is expecting
you." Millicent Vanders was waiting in a room that Leaphorn's experience
with movies and television suggested was either a study or a sitting room. She
was a frail little woman standing beside a frail little desk, supporting
herself with the tips of her fingers on its polished surface. Her hair was
almost white and the smile with which she greeted him was pale.

"Mr. Leaphorn," she said. "How good of you to come. How good
of you to help me."

Leaphorn, with no idea yet whether he would help her or not, simply returned
the smile and sat in the chair to which she motioned.

"Would you care for tea? Or coffee? Or some other refreshment? And
should I call you Mr. Leaphorn, or do you prefer 'Lieutenant'?"

"Coffee, thank you, if it's no trouble." Leaphorn said. And it's
mister. I've retired from the Navajo Tribal Police."

Millicent Vanders looked past him toward the door-. "Coffee then, and
tea," she said. She sat herself behind the desk with a slow, careful
motion that told Leaphorn his hostess had one or other of the hundred forms of
arthritis. But she smiled again, a signal meant to be reassuring. Leaphorn
detected pain in it. He'd become very good at that sort of detection while he
was watching his wife die. Emma, holding his hand, telling him not to worry,
pretending she wasn't in pain, promising that someday soon she'd be well again.

Mrs. Vanders was sorting through papers on her desk, arranging them in a
folder, untroubled by the lack of conversation. Leaphorn had found this unusual
among whites and admired it when he saw it. She extracted two eight-by-en
photographs from an envelope, examined one, added it to the folder, then
examined the other. A thump broke the silence—a careless pifion jay colliding
with a windowpane fled in wobbling flight. Mrs. Vanders continued her
contemplation of the photo, lost in some remembered sorrow undisturbed by the
bird or by Leaphorn watching her. An interesting person, Leaphorn thought.

A plump young woman appeared at his elbow bearing a tray. She placed a
napkin, saucer, cup, and spoon on the table beside him, filled the cup from a
white china pot then repeated the process at the desk, pouring the tea from a
silver container. Mrs. Vanders interrupted her contemplation of the photo, slid
it into the folder, handed it to the woman.

"Ella," she said. "Would you give this, please, to Mr.
Leaphorn?"

Ella handed it to Leaphorn and left as silently as she had come. He put the
folder on his lap, sipped his coffee, the cup was translucent china, thin as
paper. The coffee was hot, fresh, and excellent.

Mrs. Vanders was studying him. "Mr. Leaphorn," she said, "I
asked you to come here because I hope you will agree to do something for
me."

"I might agree," Leaphorn said. "What would it be?"

"Everything has to be completely confidential," Mrs. Vanders said.
"You would communicate only to me Not to my lawyers. Not to anyone
else."

Leaphorn considered this, sampled the coffee again, Put down the cup.
"Then I might not be able to help you." Mrs. Vanders looked
surprised. "Why not?"

"I've spent most of my life being a policeman," Leaphorn said.
"If what you have in mind causes me to discover anything illegal,
then—"

"If that happened, I would report it to the authorities," she said
rather stiffly.

Leaphorn allowed the typical Navajo moments of silence to make certain that
Mrs. Vanders had said all she wanted to say. She had, but his lack of response
touched a nerve.

"Of course I would," she added. "Certainly."

"But if you didn't for some reason, you understand that I would have to
do it. Would you agree to that?"

She stared at Leaphorn. Then she nodded. "I think we are creating a
problem where none exists."

"Probably," Leaphorn said.

"I would like you to locate a young woman. Or, failing that, discover
what happened to her."

She gestured toward the folder. Leaphorn opened it. The top picture was a studio
portrait of a dark-haired, dark-eyed woman wearing a mortarboard. The face was
narrow and intelligent, the expression somber. Not a girl who would have been
called "cute," Leaphorn thought. Nor pretty either, for that matter.
Handsome, perhaps. Full of character. Certainly it would be an easy face to
remember. The next picture was of the same woman, wearing jeans and a jean
jacket now, leaning on the door of a Pickup truck and looking back at the
camera. She had the look of an athlete, Leaphorn thought, and was older in this
one. Perhaps in her early thirties. On the back of each photograph the same
name was written: Catherine Anne.

Leaphorn glanced at Mrs. Vanders.

"My niece," she said. "The only child of my late
sister."

Leaphorn returned the photos to the folder and ťok out a sheaf of papers,
clipped together. The top one ad biographical details.

Catherine Anne Pollard was the full name. The birth-ate made her
thirty-three, the birthplace was Arlington, Virginia, the current address Flagstaff,
Arizona.

"Catherine studied biology," Mrs. Vanders said. "She specialized
in mammals and insects. She was working r the Indian Health Service, but
actually I think it's ore for the Arizona Health Department. The environment
division. They call her a ‘vector control specialist.' I imagine you would know
about that?"

Leaphorn nodded.

Mrs. Vanders made a wry face. "She says they actually call her a
'fleacatcher.'

"I think she could have had a good career as a tennis player. On the
tour, you know. She always loved orts. Soccer, striker on the college
volleyball team, hen she was in junior high school she worried about being
bigger than the other girls. I think excelling in orts was her compensation for
that." Leaphorn nodded again.

"The first time she came to see me after she got this, I asked for her
job title, and she said 'fleacatcher.'" Vanders's expression was sad. "Called herself that, I guess
she doesn't mind."

"It's an important job," Leaphorn said.

"She wanted a career in biology. But 'fleacatcher'?" Mrs. Vanders
shook her head. "I understand that she and some others were working on the
source of those bubonic plague cases this spring. They have a little laboratory
in Tuba City and check places where the victims might have picked up the disease.
Trapping rodents." Mrs. Vanders hesitated, her face reflecting distaste.
"That's the flea catching. They collect the fleas from them. And take
samples of their blood. That sort of thing." She dismissed this with a
wave of the hand.

"Then last week, early in the morning, she went to work and never came
back."

She let that hang there, her eyes on Leaphorn.

"She left for work alone?"

"Alone. That's what they say. I'm not so sure."

Leaphorn would come back to that later. Now he needed basic facts.
Speculation could wait.

"Went to work where?"

"The man I called said she just stopped by the office to pick up some
of the equipment she uses in her work and then drove away. To someplace out in
the country where she was trapping rodents."

"Was she meeting anyone where she was going to be working?"

"Apparently not. Not officially anyway. The man I talked to didn't
think anyone went with her."

"And you think something has happened to her. Have you discussed this
with the police?"

"Mr. Peabody discussed it with people he knows in the FBI. He said they
would not be involved in something like this. They would have jurisdiction only
if it involved a kidnapping for ransom, or"—she hesitated, glanced down at
her hands—"or some other sort of felony. They told Mr. Peabody there would
have to be evidence that a federal law had been violated."

"What evidence was there?" He was pretty sure he knew the answer.
It would be none. Nothing at all.

Mrs. Vanders shook her head.

"Actually, I guess you would say the only evidence is that a woman is
missing. Just the circumstances."

"The vehicle. Where was it found?"

"It hasn't been found. Not as far as I have been able to
discover." Mrs. Vanders's eyes were intent on Leap-horn, watching for his
reaction.

Had they not been, Leaphorn would have allowed himself a smile—thinking of
the hopeless task Mr. Peabody must have faced in trying to interest the
federals. Thinking of the paperwork this missing vehicle would cause in the
Arizona Health Department, of how this would be interpreted by the Arizona
Highway Patrol if a missing person report had been filed, of the other
complexities. But Mrs. Vanders would read a smile as an expression of cynicism.

"Do you have a theory?"

"Yes," she said, and cleared her throat. "I think she must be
dead."

Mrs. Vanders, who had seemed frail and unhealthy, now looked downright sick.

"Are you all right? Do you want to continue this?" She produced a
weak smile, extracted a small white container from the pocket of her jacket and
held it up.

"I have a heart condition," she said. "This is
nitro-glycerin. The prescription used to come in little tablets, but these days
the patient just sprays it on the tongue. Please excuse me. I'll feel fine
again in a moment."